Author: Addison Laird

“Summertime” by My Chemical Romance feelings like the end of a good movie. Like walking out the theater with your back turned to the screen as the credits roll. You got to watch your favorite characters grow and learn lessons and eventually get their happily ever afters. You almost don’t want to leave. It’s an almost indescribable feeling.

Lyn-Z, bassist of Mindless Self Indulgence

Gerard Way, lead vocalist of MCR

When the lights go out                                     Will you take me with you
And carry all this broken bone
Through six years down in crowded rooms
And highways I call home?                             Something I can’t know ’til now
‘Til you pick me off the ground
With a brick in hand, your lip-gloss smile
Your scraped-up knees

The entire song is very specific to the couple it’s written about. Gerard was on tour with My Chemical Romance for six years, thus the “six years” and “highways I call home” line. Lyn-Z was known for wearing lip gloss and falling on her knees during solos.

And if you stay, I would even wait all night                  Or until my heart explodes                                  How long? ‘Til we find our way                               in the dark and out of harm
You can run away with me anytime you want

You can run away with me anytime you want

“You can write it on your arm”

It’s insane to me how much two people can love each other. It’s insane to me how much love a human being is capable of. That’s why I love this song so much. Not only is it a great song, but it also gives me a great feelings. It doesn’t matter what the love is about, it always seems to remind me of the people I love. It’s rare for me too fine a single song that can mean this much.

It also makes me feel like I’m in a coming-of-age movie.

The end.

My knowledge of Microsoft Word is more extensive than it needs to be. During my Freshman year, I took a technology foundations class. The assignments ranged from making Power Points to programming. I can remember being a sort of teacher’s pet in this class. The teacher often showed my work to the class as an example of how to do it right and let me get away with a lot of things. This led to me taking a lot of liberties with assignments. A lot of liberties.

While searching through my Google Drive this past week, I came across a folder that hadn’t been updated since 2018. Inside was every assignment I’d completed from this class. I thought I would share them because not only are some of them fairly adequate, most of them are hilarious. This is because I was quite the fangirl Freshman year and these assignments truly reflect what I was going through.

Some assignments that I did normally were actually pretty good:

Mother’s Day card

Calendar

Adding text with pictures

Easter Cards                                                                 Valentines Day Cards

And then, other assignments were… creative, to say the least:

          Filled Empty Space                                    Make a Face Using Only Shapes

 Bookmarks                                                   Subway Art

                Collage                                                          Edited Photos

My teacher let me edit pictures of Brendon Urie and Dan Howell! And I had the best grade in the class!

We also did quite a few presentations, which included videos projects like:

                                                   Prezi Presentation About Myself

(You can view it here)

But also projects like:

                                                   Scene from Powtoon Presentation

                                                  Scene from Powtoon Presentation about a fake movie

(You can watch it here)

Up until more recently, I’d been reluctant to talk about any of my past phases. I thought they were embarrassing and that if I just ignored them, then it would be like they’d never even existed. But now, I really couldn’t care less about what I did in the past.

I’ve been through many “embarrassing” phases, but at the end of the day, it’s what got me to who I am today. I look back on Freshman year now and think how much fun I had making these. Freshman year Addison was just having a good time and I shouldn’t be embarrassed about it (no matter how many pictures I edited of Thomas Sanders as pieces of artwork).

In conclusion, owning your past, especially the embarrassing bits, is way easier than trying to ignore it. Your past is what made you who you are today. And if you’re lucky, then you may even be able to get a laugh out of it like I did.

I missed out on a lot of things as a child. One of the biggest holes in my childhood was the amount of TV shows I didn’t watch. While other kids my age were being raised on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and Hannah Montana, I was watching Dora and TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting. So for this week’s blog, I decided watched some of  Nickelodeon’s most popular shows that I didn’t watch when they first aired.

Drake and Josh

Season 4, Episode 10 – Treehouse

I knew nothing about this show going into the episode. The friend I watched it with explained to me that Drake (left) and Josh (right) were stepbrothers and that was all I needed to know to watch. The episode starts with Drake and Josh getting a model rocket from their grandmother, which that they accidentally shoot into their neighbor’s treehouse. This partially destroys the treehouse and as punishment, Drake and Josh are forced to rebuild the tree. After screwing in the last wall from the inside of the treehouse, the two realize that Drake forgot to cut a whole out for the door, trapping them both inside. They attempt to escape by ramming their bodies into the walls of the treehouse. This eventually knocks the entire treehouse to the ground with both boys inside of it. The episodes ends with them still trapped inside of the toppled treehouse.

The most shocking thing to me about Drake and Josh was that it actually made me laugh. I’m used to Nickelodeon’s newer content’s comedy, which doesn’t get so much as a chuckle out of anyone. But I laughed out loud several times throughout the episode, which really surprised me. I also like that the episode could stand alone. I had no prior knowledge to anything that took place in past seasons and still enjoyed the episode!

I only have a few criticisms. Josh Peck’s overly exaggerated acting got on my nerves, but I’m going to guess that’s normal for him on the show. The theme song didn’t fit the high energy visuals of the opening, which was disappointing because the theme song for this show gets hyped up a lot. I also couldn’t figure out how Drake and Josh knew how to build a treehouse. Aside from the door situation, the treehouse looked professionally built. But like Drake and Josh are just a couple of teenagers?? And they supposedly built it in just one afternoon??

Overall, I enjoyed it and definitely would watch more.

Rating: 4/5

Victorious

Season 2, Episode 1 – Beggin’ On Your Knees

The most I knew about Victorious before watching this episode was that Ariana Grande was on the show. I was was later told that the show was about Tori (middle) and her friends going to an art school in Hollywood. I googled the best Victorious episodes and “Beggin’ On Your Knees” was number two. Tori has to sing a solo or duet in a musical festival for one of her classes. A hot guy in her class, Ryder, asks her out right after they are given this assignment. They hang out at Tori’s house for their date, but it quickly ruined after Trina (first on left) convinces Tori to go through his phone and he catches her. The next day at school, Tori tries to make it up to Ryder but offering to do a duet with him for the music festival and their class. Robbie (second on right) finds out that Ryder is dating Tori only to get a good grade for their class (Ryder had done this multiple times before with other girls). Once Tori learns this, she and Andre (first on right) write a revenge song, which Tori sings to Ryder at the music festival, completely embarrassing him.

I actually really liked the theme song and Tori’s revenge song. Though not perfect, the show original music was just good enough for me to enjoy. Robbie’s puppet, Rex Powers, managed to make me laugh a few times. He was by far the funniest part of the show.

Honestly, I hated the transitions between each scene of Tori updating her social media status. Cat wasn’t funny and I don’t understand why everyone in Tori’s music class wanted to sing a duet with her (like they were actually fighting over her). I mean, Tori an okay singer, but was it really necessary for the whole class to be fighting over her? And finally, why didn’t Tori know Ryder was playing her if he’d done it so many times before with other girls?

In conclusion, I probably wouldn’t watch Victorious again. It wasn’t extremely funny and the characters weren’t great, especially Tori. The most the show has going for it is the music.

Rating: 2/5

I’ll be the first to admit that I have a bit of an addiction to Instagram. And it’s not the likes, follows, or even the other people on the app. It’s the pictures.

My Instagram Through the Years

I’ve had the same Instagram account since 5th grade and the evolution of my posts is actually hilarious.

2014                                                 2015

2016                                                 2017

2018

I credit 2018 for being the beginning of my Instagram photography obsession. That year brought to my page pictures such as:

It was also the year that I discovered that I could download apps to edit my pictures instead of just editing them in Instagram. This was very help and I think it improved the quality of my posts a lot!

2019

2019 was really the year that I started taking and editing  pictures of myself:

I also started talking pictures for other people. Some of my favorites I took for my younger sister:

2020

Even though we’re only about a month into 2020, I expect that I’ll be experimenting more with editing. The posts I’ve already posted and will be posting in the next few weeks are already some of my favorite pictures:

Social Media and Self Image

It’s generally known that social media can take a negative toll on someone’s self image. We tend to compare our lives to other people’s while using services such as Instagram. If we’re not posting pictures with friends, significant others, or on vacation, then we’re not as good as the people who are, right?

This, obviously, is wrong. When we’re on social media, we’re not seeing the whole story. We are only seeing the best of someone’s life and we’re only being told what they want us to hear. An Instagram profile is never an accurate portrayal of someone’s life.

Once you figure this out, social becomes a whole lot more fun! I speak from experience when I say this. I got Instagram in fifth grade because everyone else had it. I posted the same stuff that I saw everyone else posting. But once I realized that I shouldn’t care about likes or what anyone else was doing, Instagram become more of a way for me to express myself than a way to impress others and get likes.

I also learned a very vital lesson about photography: It doesn’t take much to take a good photo. I learned how to pose, edit, and use angles to my advantage. As a person who’s struggled to keep up a positive self image, sees such good pictures of myself really helped my confidence.

Of course, editing pictures of yourself is a little risky. Usually, people will over analyze pictures of themselves, pointing out every minor flaw. It’s possible that they may edit things such as the shape of their face and body, pimples, and other aspects of themselves that they may consider flaws. What helped me overcome this was remembering that not everyone sees my flaws the way I do. What I may think is a terrible flaw that completely ruins the picture might be so small that someone else may not even notice it.

Connor, a fellow junior Media, once told me he could never take a good picture of himself. I told him that was impossible and that I could take a good picture of him right then and there. And I did:

These pictures were taken in 10 minutes in a staircase during class. Not the most convenient time or place, but it proves that you don’t need much to take a good picture.

In short, social media can actually be a good thing if you let it be. It was never meant make us compare ourselves to others. It was meant to help us stay connected and be expressive.

In November of 2019, Safiya Nygaard, one of my favorite YouTube content creators, got married. I’m the type of person to get attached to celebrities and fictional characters (aka people I don’t actually know), so watching someone I’d been subscribed to for years get married made me very emotional. So emotional, in fact, that I just had to write about it!

For most of 2019, Safiya’s videos were wedding related. She tried wedding dresses from Wish, had a McDonald’s wedding in Hong Kong, and baked a wedding cake with over 30 different cake flavors mixed together. But among these fun videos were also more serious ones. Her now-husband, Tyler Williams (another YouTube content creator), vlogged the process of buying Safiya a ring and proposing to her. Safiya also uploaded a video following the process of her getting a custom made wedding dress.

And then on January 5th of 2020, Safiya uploaded a video titled “Our Wedding | Safiya & Tyler”.

I’m going to be honest, I cried. I cried a lot. I’m a sucker for sweet, sappy things and that’s all the video was. Both of them looked beautiful and the decorators were gorgeous and the whole thing was just amazing!

Anyway, things about their wedding really struck a chord with me. Firstly, the decorations. Safiya had been teasing potential decorations and themes for months, but finally seeing everything come together was just magical!

It really made me reconsider my feelings towards the weddings I’ve been too. Safiya and Tyler’s wedding put the other weddings to shame.

The second thing was Safiya and Tyler’s first dance.

In the 1993 film Addams Family Values, Gomez and Morticia Addams dance an elaborate version of the Tango during one of their dates. It included many moves that were complicated and even edited in post.

For their first dance as a married couple, Safiya and Tyler decided to recreate the dance step by step. It was nothing short of awesome!

I mentioned that I can get overly attached to celebrities and fictional characters, and I feel the need to explain that more. I discovered Safiya during a time in my life when I wasn’t exactly happy. Safiya’s uploads always brightened my day. Whether she was dressing like it was 1987 or mixing all of her eyeshadows together, they always made me smile. Although I’m happier now, I still enjoy her content and she still holds a special place in my heart. Seeing her so happy at her wedding was heartwarming, to say the least.

According to Instagram, Safiya and Tyler are at home with their cat, Krusty, happily married. That honestly sounds like the perfect ending/beginning of this chapter in their lives.

Last semester, my U.S. History class was given the assignment to write a song. We had just finished learning about the emergence of counter culture in the 60s and about how music during this time period reflected the current issues (feminism, Black Power, environmentalism). The only direction that the class received was “Write a song about a current issue.” So I wrote a song about mass shootings.

(I tried to insert a video of me singing the song, but it didn’t work 🙁 )

It’s one o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon                                                                                   I feel I’m hardly living because I’m at school                                                                     But when the teacher tells me to run and hide                                                                       I know I might be dead by one o’ nine

This was the first verse of the song that I wrote. School shoots are something that strikes a powerful chord in me, being a student and all. I tried to be clever with the way I wrote this particular verse. I used an exact time because I wanted to show how quickly a child could go from being bored in a classroom, or “hardly living”, to actually being scared for their life.

And now I’m staring down the barrel of a gun                                                                    When I asked him why, he told me “I’m not the only one”                                                      As he pulled the trigger, he looked at me and said                                                          “They’ll remember me even though you’re the one that’s dead”

Each chorus is written a little differently. For the first one, which was also written first, I wrote from the point of view someone being confronted by a shooter. The shooter tells the victim that the shooter is “not the only one”, as in not the only person to be driven to kill, and “they’ll remember me even though you’re the on that’s dead”. The last line was inspired by many cases of murder in which the killer’s name lives on in infamy while his victims are forgotten.

This music was the loudest I’d ever heard                                                                       Until the shots rang out, could be heard across the world                                                      The screams didn’t drown out the terror inside                                                                        It’s clear I will go deaf if I make it out alive

This verse is inspired by both the 2017 Las Vegas shooting and the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.

And to be staring down the barrel of a gun                                                                             When I asked him why, he told me “I’m not the last one”                                                        As he pulled the trigger, he looked at me and said                                                                “Say hello to God for me if you make it to heaven”

The second chorus has the shooter telling his victim that he will not be the last one to do what he is doing. He also tells the victim to say hello to God if they make it too heaven. I wrote this line thinking that whoever the victim is, they may not be the best person and the shooter doesn’t know if they’re going to heaven or not.

Columbine, Sandy Hook, The Pulse, and Las Vegas                                                 Couldn’t have waited even if they’d wanted to save us                                                    And if they had then where would we be?                                                                     Would we be closer to a cure or further out to sea?

The bridge references Columbine (1999) and Sandy Hook (2012), both school shootings, The Pulse (2016), a shooting at an Orlando nightclub, and the Las Vegas shooting (2017).  It says that these tragedies were inevitable and effected our society in unchangeable ways, though it’s unclear if the impact will be positive or negative in the long run.

And when you’re staring down the barrel of a gun                                                       When they ask them why, they’ll tell you that they’re already gone                                As they pull the trigger, you’ll look at them and say                                                              I know you’re gone, but please don’t take my life away

The last verse of the song serves as a warning from the victim. The victim is saying what will inevitably happen.

From what I could gather, my class enjoyed the song. I have no idea where else I could perform something like this, but for now, I’m happy just leaving it here for the enjoyment of whoever wants to read about it.

Have you ever gotten in your own way of doing something that you really wanted to do? I know I have. For as long as I can remember, I’ve stopped myself from doing things that I actually really wanted to do because I’ve been too afraid to do them. I’ve skipped dances and parties because I didn’t think anyone wanted me there. I’ve avoided speaking with people because I believed that they would find me annoying and wouldn’t want to talk to me. I have been this way  for as long as I can remember. Around this time last year, I realized a change had to be made.

“Try new things”

I had never really considered making a New Years’ resolution before last year. I don’t quite remember what made me do it, but I decided that 2019 was going to be the year that I tried new things. Somehow I thought this may stop me from getting in my own way and missing out on things but it didn’t quite work out the way I wanted it to.

I started ordering new things at restaurants. Although this wasn’t the parties and other social interactions I was looking for, it was a start. I discovered a love for eggrolls and hummus through this practice.

By May, I was sure that I was coming to MSA. This was a definite case of me trying something new, as I had previously attended the same school since Pre-K. That summer, I did a lot of traveling. For a long time, I counted this as trying something new. But after a while, I realized that my travels didn’t count. Even though I was going to new places and seeing new things, I wasn’t really challenging myself. Therefore, it didn’t count.

So by the time December rolled around, I realized two things. One was that I had remembered my resolution until the end of the year, which is not a common occurrence. Another was that despite remembering my resolution, I hadn’t really done much with it. Sure, I’d eaten new things, traveled, and made some major life changes, but I still felt unsatisfied. I still felt as though I wasn’t doing the best that I could.

“Work for what you want… then get it”

For my 2020 resolution, I decided to go all in. No more stopping myself from doing things just because I’m afraid to do them. If 2019 and a failed resolution taught me anything, it was that I’m a bit of a pushover. I missed out on a lot because I was lazy or too nervous to do something and now I regret it. So this year, if I want something, I’m going to get it. And if I have to work to get it, then I’m going to do just that. I’m going to work hard for what I want and take it.

I’ve realized that if you don’t let yourself do what you want, then you’ll never get to do anything you want to do. It’s as simple as that. I have no idea why it took me so long to figure that out.

So to anyone reading this, I’d like to let you know that you shouldn’t waste time standing in your own way. Talk to new people even though they may find you annoying! You shouldn’t care about what they think of you! Try new things, even if it scares you at first! You’ll likely regret not taking doing it! Don’t be like me. Take a risk every once in a while. I know that sounds cliché, but trust me when I say you won’t regret it.